Digital pharmacy startup ScriptDash has raised $23 million in Series B financing and will now go by Alto as it plans to expand its services beyond local delivery.
“Alto’s Latin root means ‘elevated’ or ‘tall,’ and we’re trying to elevate the pharmacy experience,” co-founder Mattieu Gamache-Asselin said.
According to Tech Crunch, San Francisco-based Alto has delivered more than 100,000 prescriptions to 12,000 patients living in the area since its launch in June of 2015. The startup now plans to offer doctors and clinics an easier backend system to fill prescriptions.
“Doctors and technicians call each other day in and day out trying to coordinate something, but they need a technology platform,” Gamache-Asselin said.
In addition, the company is using its new capital to move beyond the Bay Area for a nationwide rollout. Greenoaks Capital led the funding round, with participation from Jackson Square Ventures; Rahul Mehta of DST; Craig Sherman from Meritech Capital; Justin Kan from Y Combinator and Twitch; and his brother, Daniel Kan, Cruise COO.
Alto does have competition in trying to solve the communications issues for doctors and pharmacies — ZappRX, Capsule and Zipdrug, for example — it aims to modernize on the backend and onboard providers to use the startup’s new pharmacy communications platform. That could help the site’s sales since prescription refills are a small percentage of the pharmacy business. In fact, Alto sees most of its business from walk-ins and post-dated prescriptions.
That means that if Alto is to grow, it needs to rely more on the doctors sending new or infrequent prescriptions through the system to fulfill orders. Therefore, it makes sense for it to build a backend terminal to fulfill orders rather than focus just on prescription delivery.
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